Page 51 of The Midnight Hour
It was something Daniel had refused to dwell on. Sam hadn’t said a word.
And so they’d traveled to the nursing home—driving at night for safety, sleeping during the day, crawling down Route90, ignoring the exodus. Four days of tension and fear and purpose, and then, amazingly, they’d pulled into theparking lot of Tall Oaks like they had a hundred times before to visit Granny, steeling themselves for her inevitable decline, noticeable in increments, and always painful.
This, Daniel knew, would be entirely different.
The nursing home had looked as abandoned as everything else; Daniel had been sure he would find nothing but rotting corpses, and there had been plenty of those, but when he’d made it through the secure doors—left unlocked when the power had failed—holding his breath against the stench, Jenny had stirred from a recliner by the blank-faced TV where she’d been wasting away, nothing more than skin and brittle bone, and Daniel had gaped at her, utterly amazed.
She and Pauline had been drinking the bottled water in the memory unit’s little kitchen and subsisting on packets of cookies and crackers as well as the apples and oranges in the fruit bowl that were kept out for residents. They’d both been impossibly frail and yet they’d been alive. Jenny had seemed almost regal as she’d risen from the chair, talking to Daniel like she’d been waiting for a taxi that had finally arrived. Despite everything, it had almost made him smile; she was true to form, if nothing else.
But it had quickly become clear that Pauline wasn’t as strong as Jenny, and now, just a few hours later, she was dead.
Good, Daniel thought, but he didn’t say it aloud. He pulled over to the side of the road and opened the back door, trying not to breathe, just in case. They were about fifty miles from Springfield, heading north on Route91, somewhere between Bernardston and Brattleboro, Vermont. The crowds had started to thin out maybe twenty miles back; people either hadn’t made it this far or hadn’t wanted to. Daniel was glad; abandoned roads were easier in all sorts of ways, but they only had a quarter tank of gas left, and he didn’t know where they were going to find any more.
Now, as gently and respectfully as he can, he pullsPauline out of the car while Sam watches, apprehensive. “Should we bury her?” he asks.
“No.”
“Dad…” His son’s protest fades away into silence.
“We don’t have time,” Daniel tells him brusquely, an explanation rather than an apology, although in truth he feels a flicker of guilt. If he were a better man, he’d want to bury an innocent woman, or at least show her some respect. “We have to find somewhere to hole up while I look for gas.” By his reckoning, they’re a hundred miles or so from Boston, eighty from Hartford—not far enough. Vermont, he hopes, is far north enough to be safer, at least from the radiation. Whether they’ll encounter gangs in that green and pleasant land remains to be seen.
Daniel’s plan is to find an abandoned house and rest for a few days while Jenny regains some of her strength. He’ll find enough gas to get back to Canada, and they’ll try to cross in Vermont, up into Quebec.
He leaves Pauline by the side of the road, after crossing her arms over her chest. It’s all he can think to do to create a sense of occasion, of seriousness.
“Should you say something?” Sam asks uncertainly.
Daniel tries to summon a prayer, but his mind feels both blank and full of static. “Rest in peace,” he finally says, wearily. He gets back in the car and keeps driving. Jenny hasn’t even stirred from her sleep. He wonders if she’ll remember Pauline, or even notice that she is gone. His head throbs and his mouth is dry; he’s trying to conserve water but he knows he should probably drink something. Is a dry mouth a side effect of radiation poisoning? He remembers, when his aunt had radiotherapy for cancer, it dried up her salivary glands so she couldn’t even spit. Is that happening to him? Is his body already being destroyed from the inside out? Is Sam’s?
“He stayed in the car,” Daniel reminds himself. “He stayed in the car.”
It is only when Sam asks him if he’s talking to himself that Daniel realizes he said it out loud.
They’re about twenty miles from Brattleboro when the warning light appears on the gas tank. They’re nearly at empty—and at the end of the road.
Daniel slows as he glimpses a barricade that has been set up across the whole road—an impenetrable barrier of oil drums and concrete blocks. An effort has been made here, and Daniel sees why when he spies the bullet-proof vests of the Vermont state police. For some reason, this shocks him; it’s the first police presence he’s seen since the Canadian Border Services on the St.Lawrence over a month ago.
“What…” Sam breathes.
Daniel brakes. He can’t drive through that kind of blockade, and he’s queasily apprehensive as a police officer strides toward him. He rolls down the window.
“You’ll have to go back,” the officer informs him flatly. “No crossing here.”
“No crossing…?”
“Vermont is a no-contamination zone.”
Awhat? Daniel almost wants to laugh. Does this guy think he can stop the radioactive cloud from rolling onward?
“What does that mean, exactly?” he asks, tensely conscious that the police officer is holding a SIGSauer semiautomatic rifle, a no-kidding-around kind of weapon.
“It means no one is coming in,” the man explains irritably. “We’ve closed the state borders.”
“But why…”
“Because we don’t want a bunch of radioactive zombies flooding in,” the man snaps. “Now reverse your vehicle or suffer theconsequences.”
He raises his rifle meaningfully and Daniel nods, rolls up the window, and starts reversing.
